WASHINGTON —- As House Republicans voted Thursday to pass a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by states, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-CA, and AI experts said the measure would be necessary to ensure US dominance in the industry.
“We want to make sure that AI continues to be led by the United States of America, and we want to make sure that our economy and our society realizes the potential benefits of AI deployment,” Obernolte said.
As Artificial Intelligence has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of society, federal and state leaders clash over the states’ ability to regulate it on their own.
According to data from the National Conference of State Legislators, legislation to regulate AI had already been introduced in 48 states. In 2024 alone, nearly 700 such bills were introduced, and 75 were adopted or enacted.
40 state attorneys general have co-signed a letter to Congress, urging them not to pass this measure.
“This bill does not propose any regulatory scheme to replace or supplement the laws enacted or currently under consideration by the states, leaving Americans entirely unprotected from the potential harms of AI,” the letter states.
However, Obernolte said leaving AI regulation up to the individual states could create a series of complex and confusing rules that make it difficult for innovators to operate.
“We risk creating this very balkanized regulatory landscape of potentially 50 different state regulations going in 50 different, and in some cases wildly different directions,” Obernolte said during an event Thursday on Capitol Hill. “It would be a barrier to entry for everybody.”
The moratorium bill now awaits a vote in the Senate. It faces widespread opposition, mostly from Democrats but also some Republicans, who argue that it leaves Americans without safeguards from AI.
“We need those protections, and until we pass something that is federally preemptive, we can't call for a moratorium on those things,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, at a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
However, Obernolte addressed some of these concerns by pointing out that agencies already regulate AI in various ways. For example, he said that the Food and Drug Administration has already issued over 1,000 permits for the use of AI in medical devices.
Logan Kolas, the director of tech policy at the American Consumer Institute, said that part of the problem with states jumping to regulate AI without careful consideration is that the technology is so new that we do not understand the real problems.
“There's a lot of things we don't know, and that does require a bit of humility. As these provable harms come up, those are the things that we absolutely 100% should be addressing, but, trying to anticipate them, to think of the millions of possibilities of what could go wrong, is just unrealistic and not the way that we have done successful policy in the past,” said Kolas.
Perry Metzger, the chairman of the board of Alliance for the Future, a non-profit dedicated to helping lessen fears of AI, echoed Kolas’s claims and said that regulations on AI as a whole would be counterproductive because AI is merely a tool to accomplish things. He said the dangers of AI technology lie in how people use it, not the technology itself.
“We have a tradition [in this country] that I think is very important. That is, not blaming manufacturers for egregious and knowing misuses of their tools. We do not say that the Ford Motor Company is liable whenever someone uses an F-150 in a bank robbery. We have a feeling in our country that the people who choose to rob banks are responsible for that sort of misuse,” said Metzger.
Athan Yanos is a graduate student at Northwestern Medill in the Politics, Policy and Foreign Affairs specialization. He is a New York native. Prior to Medill, he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Edinburgh. He also hosts his own podcast dedicated to philosophy and international politics.
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A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.